Free Internet based paraphrasing tools: further threats to academic integrity

This study took text from an existing publication and processed it through two online paraphrasing tools to examine the output. The output was further tested by seeing if a text matching machine could detect that the work was actually copied. The paraphrasing output was poor in terms of word choice and grammar while the text matching machine had difficulty in matching the output with the original work. There were some clues that can assist in detecting their use. What sort of text do the online tools produce? The online tools rely appear to rely on a couple of basic rules. They use synonyms – words or phrases that may be similar to the original word but may have slight differences in meaning depending on what is being written about. One of the tools in the test changed the phrase ‘employee performance reviews’ to ‘representative execution surveys’ – not an approach that would be encouraged when managing employees. They also leave basic works such as ‘to’, ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘that’ and ‘in’ (known as conjunctions), and appear to avoid changing words near punctuation or internet addresses (for example brackets, commas, colons or URLs). Why are online paraphrasing tools a threat to academic integrity? These tools are a significant threat to academic integrity. These tools are a significant threat to academic integrity as they encourage students (and others) to copy work and rely on a computer generated output rather than writing themselves. This preven...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Technology International Journal for Educational Integrity paraphrase Source Type: blogs